Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (14 page)

These two faces are both evident in one picture on the walls of S-21, on a second-floor exhibition room, where Duch is shown at trial. There is his face, but it has been defaced. Visitors have scrawled insults and obscenities over it. He is only a man, perhaps one of exceptional ability but not an alien, and they do not like what they see, precisely because he looks no different than us. His resemblance to us and our resemblance to him causes fear, which is why some visitors deface him. An ethics of recognition would prevent us from defacing him, from misrecognizing him as the devil incarnate, for the resemblance to the human is what we must remember if we hope not to repeat atrocities. Ethics is optics, and it demands that we see how Duch is man, human and inhuman. We must continue to look at the horrors done by humans like him if we are to learn anything, if we are to imagine not just a hopeful utopian future but also an alternate dystopian one where, if the Khmer Rouge had succeeded, Duch would not be a devil but an angel. This would force us to ask whether those we imagine as angels today are not simply triumphant devils who have written their own stories, in the manner of so many bomb-launching bureaucrats and elected officials with ghostwritten memoirs.

For artists, looking, remembering, and creating art are themselves ways of recognizing the ambiguities of the human and inhuman. As Panh says toward the end of
The Missing Picture
, “There are many things that man should not see or know. Should he see them, he’d be better off dying. But should any of us see or know these things, then we must live to tell of them.… I make this picture. I look at it. I cherish it. I hold it in my hand like a beloved face. This is the picture I now hand over to you, so that it never ceases to seek us out.” Unlike Levinas, who turns the face of the Other into the face of goodness, Panh sees two faces—the beloved face he offers us and the face of Duch, torturer, tormentor, and teacher. Panh nevertheless follows Levinas when the philosopher calls “justice this face to face approach, in conversation,”
⁵⁰
which is “an ethical relation.”
⁵¹
The interviews with Duch are this conversation, this relationship with the other that aims for justice through dialogue. The relationship with the reader of
The Elimination
and the viewer of
The Missing Picture
are conversations as well; Panh is our other and we are the others to him. Justice is found in this aesthetic relationship, too—justice on the ground of art and in even more worldly terms, on the ground of history and our understanding of humanity and inhumanity. In wanting to recognize Duch as both human and inhuman, Panh enacts an ethics of recognition that both affirms the importance of infinity and justice, the way we want the world to be, and which also demands a confrontation with totality, the way the world was or is. An ethics of recognition that confronts the totality around us and within us reveals the stereoscopic simultaneity of human and inhuman. So it is that Panh turns to figurines to approach the humanity of victims, and the S-21 museum turns to the picture of the laughing face to approach the inhuman response to suffering. Missing in both of these renditions is the actual human face, the photographed face shown in S-21. With this absence comes the suggestion that we need the artist as well as the philosopher to sketch for us an ethics of recognition, to create for us a picture of the inhuman face.

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4

On War Machines

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE WROTE THAT
“if something is to stay in the memory it must be
burned
in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.”
¹
The war has burned itself into many of us, including myself, seared at too young of an age to know exactly where the scar is. Those born too young to remember with clarity, or to remember anything at all, may still see the war’s afterimages lingering on their retinas, a result of what W. G. Sebald so memorably called “secondhand memory.”
²
A German writer who expatriated himself to England, he spent his life trying to remember a war that ended before he crawled out of the crib. Secondhand memories are part of refugee baggage, too. At times, these memories are intimate legacies bequeathed to us by families and friends who saw the war firsthand; other times, these memories are Hollywood fantasies, the archetype being
Apocalypse Now
, a modern-day Grimm’s fairy tale where napalm lights the dark forest. Many Americans, and people the world over, assume they know something of Vietnam from watching movies like
Apocalypse Now
. For having paid the price of a movie ticket, they, too, can say, as Michael Herr did, “Vietnam, we’ve all been there.”
³

I think this is true even for those with only the faintest of secondhand memories. They have been to Vietnam in the sense that they have seen it burn on screen and in photos, since the war is “the most chronicled, documented, reported, filmed, taped, and—in all likelihood—narrated war in history.”
⁴
My students tell me that they have heard of this war, although they have little sense of what happened and how Americans got there. These students are not a postwar generation but a wartime one, born in the 1980s and 1990s and living through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For an American society that goes to war every couple of decades, the distinction among prewar, wartime, and postwar is blurred. Rather than a discrete event, war is a continuum, an ebb and flow in intensity that occasionally spikes. War has always been a part of our lives, a dull hum of white noise that blends in with the air conditioning, the computers, the hum of traffic. People like my students are accustomed to seeing a burning monk on an album cover or an iconic photo from the war on a rock star’s wall.
⁵
The camera of the show
MTV Cribs
dwells on the photo, blown up to cover the entire wall, as the rock star describes the scene. “This is a famous image from
Life
magazine,” he said. “It’s obviously a guy getting shot in the head. I had this put here as a reminder of human suffering. I think when I walk out and see this every day, I kind of gain some gratitude for where my life is at.” He lives his life in a beautiful Hollywood Hills home with a view of all of Los Angeles. While at a rooftop bar of a chic downtown hotel, I looked at a similar view of Los Angeles and noticed
Apocalypse Now
being projected onto the wall of a neighboring building. The movie played silently as a mud-slick Martin Sheen emerged from swamp water to hack Marlon Brando to death. Nobody on the roof looked twice.

Even if the war no longer burns for many people, its afterimages are unforgettable. Another name for these kinds of glowing afterimages are what Marita Sturken, drawing from Freud, calls “screen memories.”
⁶
These memories both screen out other memories and serve as the screen for the projection of our private and collective pasts, our own home movies. Although screen memories need not be visual images, most of our vivid screen memories from Vietnam are: Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the naked, napalmed girl running down a road in Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph; Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk immolating himself on a Saigon street corner in 1963 to protest President Ngo Dinh Diem’s treatment of Buddhists, caught by both still and moving cameras; and the picture on the rock star’s wall of Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting Viet Cong suspect Nguyen Van Lem in the head during the Tet Offensive of 1968, an act captured by both Eddie Adams’ still camera and by a television crew.

These images are evidence not only of Vietnamese suffering, but of the power of the entire apparatus that delivers the images to us. This apparatus extends from the photographer to his equipment to the bureau that pays for his time and his film to the machines that airlift that film from outside the war zone to the homeland offices that copyright, distribute, archive, and circulate in perpetuity those images in which the Vietnamese are burned and scarred by what the filmmaker Harun Farocki called an “inextinguishable fire.”
⁷
Their suffering is forever fixed, their images of pain overshadowing or eradicating memories of other victims of this war. These images, screen memories, and secondhand memories affirm not only what is literally printed on the film, shown on the screen, or indelibly scratched onto the glass of our eyes—they affirm the power of an industry of memory as well. These shots were seen around the world because Western media possessed the apparatus to helicopter journalists into and out of battlefields with endless film rolls, processing their negatives almost immediately, and printing them globally on the same day or the day after the event in question. In contrast, North Vietnamese photographers lived in the jungles, hoarded their handfuls of film rolls, and dispatched their negatives over treacherous land routes to Hanoi via messengers who were often killed by bombardment.
⁸
These circumstances limited what North Vietnamese eyes saw and limited the kinds of Vietnamese that the world recognized.

Recognizing the individual’s face, or even a people’s collective visage, is important, particularly if we speak of faces destroyed by war machines. But equally important is understanding how recognition is produced, how an industry of memory creates memories. An “industry of memory” differs from a “memory industry” in the same way that a “war machine” is not the same as an “arms industry.” At worst, invoking a memory industry brings to mind a cottage industry, a provincial economy geared toward producing something easily bought and ironically forgettable: key chains, coffee mugs, t-shirts, animal or human safaris, or, in Vietnam, pens and necklaces supposedly made from American bullets. At best, a memory industry calls forth the professionalization of memory through the creation of museums, archives, festivals, documentaries, history channels, interviews, and so on. But the work that memory industries do is only part of an industry of memory. To mistake memory as just a commodity for sale, or information to be transmitted by experts, would be like considering a gun and its manufacturer, or a surveillance system and its designers, to be simply products of an arms industry. Arms industries are only the most visible parts of a war machine. In war machines, the bristling armaments are on display, but more important are the ideas, ideologies, fantasies, and words that justify war, the sacrifices of our side, and the death of others.

Likewise, an industry of memory includes the material and ideological forces that determine how and why memories are produced and circulated, and who has access to, and control of, the memory industries. Certain kinds of memories and remembering are possible because an industry of memory depends on, and creates, “structures of feeling.” That term by Raymond Williams pulls together both the concrete (a structure) and the immaterial (a feeling).
⁹
A feeling, no matter how invisible, houses us, shapes us, lets us see the world through its windows. As structures vary from rich to middle class to poor, from wealthy nations and metropolises to colonies and hamlets, so do feelings themselves vary. The world pays attention to the feelings of the wealthy and the powerful, because those feelings matter when the wealthy and the powerful make decisions that can burn. The feelings of the poor and the weak are much less visible, except, of course, to the poor and the weak. As it is with feeling and its structures, so it is with memory and an industry of memory, where the memories of the wealthy and the powerful exert more influence because they own the means of production. As Marx and Engels said, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
¹⁰
So, too, are their feelings and memories the most powerful, made, packaged, distributed, and exported in ways that overshadow the feelings and memories of the weak.